Two weapon fighting as a bonus action has always bugged me

Two weapon fighting as a bonus action has always bugged me. Here's a house rule I might use: If you take an attack action, you can strike with two weapons you hold in place of each attack, but they deal 1/2 damage. You can do this with 1-handed melee and/or ranged weapons.

Twitch, tell me why this doesn’t work other than halving damage being a bit of a pain. I am either dumb for missing something or dumb for not just doing this like 5 years ago. Or maybe a cleaner approach – drop die size by 1 and add half modifier for each attack. That basically turns a 2d6 greatsword into two 1d6 attacks.

And honestly, this is all just an excuse to make it easier to adapt Bjorn Battlehammer, my first long-running character in 3e, a dwarf fighter who wielded a battle axe and flail. He had wings of flying! They got him into a TON of trouble!

A DWer would need to be careful versus an opponent with resistance, for sure. I kind of like that, to be honest. I see our barbarian dropping one longsword, twohanding the other, and then making a mighty blow to crack through that gargoyle's resistance.

I’m a fan of “where reality is cool, use it!” in game design, so I’d like to run a potential alternative by you, if that’s okay: Allowing missed attacks from one weapon to be rerolled with the other weapon (no bonus action consumption, no ability mod to the damage as normal). in general, testing had very negative reactions to stuff that wasn't attack twice. even with the math working out, people like swinging twice. otherwise, i'd be all over that!

Why it bugged you? It looks nice to me, just because the action economy. Could you explain why it bugged you? Things like rage and so forth, that naturally want to use the bonus action, step on the toes of two-weapon fighting

If a Paladin did it, and both attacks hit, would you 1/2 the divine smite damage if they did it with both weapons? Also would each weapon have its own attack roll? yes, seeing separate attacks, halving ALL damage

How about keeping dmg RAW, but decreasing AC (or give advantage on all attacks against the char), as going full melee distracts from parry and dodging incoming attacks? trading offense for defense can be tricky, since you can combo that up with a defensive character or just alpha strike stuff before it can counter

I’m guessing in your house rule you roll both attacks, but what if you made a combined weapon attack that only made one attack roll (using bonuses from your main hand) and then rolled all the damage and halved it? Maybe a feat to add the bonus from offhand/reduce dmg penalty? Yeah, and this is why I like going with drop die one size and half bonus instead. Making one roll and adding both attack dmg together matches up with a two handed weapon

Why not just say ‘once per turn’ instead of eating up your bonus action. The light weapon requirement and lack of ability mod keeps damage in line.

I like the regulation that the bonus action does in the system. Remember the turns taking forever in the playtest/4e/3.x? The challenge is that bonus actions sit on so many key class and race features – unnecessarily hoses TWF What do my twin daggers d4 become then without halving dice?

I mean, honestly, if you want to get rid of bonus actions, just make things a free action you can do at most once per turn when X occurs. Why need to make anything more complicated than that? All those free things can stack up